[TUHS] Mythical Distress Sale (was Re: moving directories in svr2)

[arnold at skeeve.com]

OK, serious question. Why did Sun "sell out" to AT&T if they could
have raised capital in the market?  Did the executive team just not
care about what moving to System V would mean? Or did they not understand
it?

How desperate were they? And why were they so desparate? Were there
other alternatives they could have pursued?

I too lived through those times, from the outside, and it was indeed
a shocker when they moved from SunOS to Solaris.

Thanks,

Arnold

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Rob, you've painted this picture before and it just doesn't match up
> at all with what I saw.  I was there.  Ken Okin paid me for 6 months to
> try and convince the execs to not go to SVR4.  If it was all sweetness
> and light, why did he do that?
>
> You make it sound like it was a nice friendly deal.  It was $200M of
> Sun stock at 35% over market rate.  Who does that just to be friends?
> You say you could have gone to market and gotten that, well, sure,
> but not at 35% over market.
>
> SunOS was winning all the deals, as you point out, Sun was growing
> like crazy.  I did lots and lots of customer presentations and not once
> did I hear "oh, when are you guys going to standardize on System V?"
>
> Quite the opposite in fact.  I was doing a talk at the Moscone center
> on the first Sun cluster that I had built, Scott refused to let me ship
> it with SunOS, so I was being a good soldier and talking up Solaris.
> Over and over and over I was asked why we were forcing people to use
> an obviously worse OS and I finally lost it and said "I know, I have
> everything working in SunOS but they won't let me ship it."
>
> I was on tape.  Okin listened to the tape and said "get every copy of
> those tapes and destroy them".  Not exactly the friendly everyone
> agreeing picture you paint.  Not remotely like that.
>
> Rob, I lived through that time.  One of my close friends, John Pope,
> did the bring up.  He felt alienated from all the other kernel people
> because we all loved SunOS and we hated Solaris, it made zero sense to
> go that far backward.  And look what it got you.  Sun is gone.
>
> If you could have gone to market and gotten the money, you would
> have.  Sun was killing it, everyone wanted a Sun over every other
> workstation, in the SunOS days, every open source thing just built
> on Suns.  Everyone else had to twiddle the makefiles and the source.
> Your story that people wanted a standard just doesn't hold up when
> you were the standard.  It also doesn't hold up when every single
> customer I talked to (and I talked to them at least twice a month
> in formal presentations and frequently more like twice a week, 
> the sales people loved me) never asked for SVR4.  Not once did that
> come up.  And when SVR4 was being pushed on them, 100% of them
> pushed back and wanted SunOS.
>
> On Tue, Jan 04, 2022 at 01:28:20AM -0800, Rob Gingell wrote:
> > On 1/3/2022 6:28 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > >Of course, that's assuming that Sun could have stayed afloat without
> > >that injection of cash from AT&T....
> > 
> > What causes you to assert that Sun was at risk of not staying afloat?
> > 
> > Sun went from $0/yr to over $1B/yr in revenue between 1982 and 1988, the
> > prototype for what people now call "unicorns".
> > 
> > Between 1985 and 1989 Sun grew at a compounded rate of 145% a year, and
> > according to Forbes was the fastest growing company in the US in those
> > years.
> > 
> > Doesn't sound like a company foundering to me, certainly not in 1987 and
> > 1988. Didn't sound like it to AT&T either, who wanted in on the action and
> > so bought a bunch of Sun stock on terms very favorable to Sun (and
> > financially speaking of benefit to both companies when AT&T divested some
> > years later).
> > 
> > The injection of capital was certainly useful to Sun, not because of
> > distress or failure, but because it was bursting at the seams from all the
> > growth. Sun was going to get that capital without AT&T by going to the
> > market anyway, that it was able to do so on more favorable terms with an
> > already established partner was literally an example of the rich getting
> > richer. The partnership to inject SunOS technologies, do SVR4, harmonize the
> > various UNIX flavors had already been committed and launched some months
> > before the investment occurred and wasn't contingent upon it.
> > 
> > They're not unrelated of course, the investment occurred in the context of
> > the already committed partnership. And if you examine the announced
> > expectations of that partnership it included some strong dependencies on Sun
> > products and technologies by AT&T in both the near and long term. The
> > gestalt of the investment was that it was a consequence of "well, if we're
> > already doing all this, then..."
> > 
> > Certainly the later transitions in Sun's products had lots of issues. But
> > lessons aren't gained from "well, they meant well, but, poor sods, they were
> > barely staying alive" especially when the premise isn't even remotely
> > accurate.
> > 
> > It's a much more interesting examination to consider: "they had agency, they
> > made choices, the context was <pretty complex>, why that and not this, what
> > was the alternative, etc." Since we can have the facts, why not premise the
> > discussions on those?
>
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm